Авторские размышления об окружающем мире, о любви, ненависти, предательстве и дружбе под музыку российского шансона.

But nathelees, syn I knowe youre delit, / I shal fulfille youre worldly appetit.1 Chaucer’s Wife of Bath centers on a wonderfully fruitful paradox: she claims for women and for herself the right to “maistrie” and “sovereynetee” in marriage, but she does so by articulating the discourse imparted to her by the “auctoritee” of anti-feminism.2 Indeed, this paradoxical challenge to and reiteration of anti-feminist ideas has left Chaucer’s readers debating for decades which way the irony cuts: is the Wife to (...) be understood as a proto-feminist, or is she merely “a delightful buffoon inadvertently lampooning herself for the ironic pleasure of a knowing, male audience”?3 How we choose to answer this question .. (shrink)

The manuscripts of Harriot discussed in this paper are essentially rough notes marginal to his systematic treatment of algebra, of which a small part was published posthumously. The central theme is the sign-rule for multiplication; but the incidentals open up an aspect of symbolism in mathematics entirely new for the time. A more restricted aspect of the same theme was touched on by Commandino in his Euclid, quoted by Harriot as rightly blaming ‘those that thinke that minus per minus shal (...) produce plus’; Commandino's authority was Cardano, in a similarly marginal departure from his great Ars magna, the de Aliza, which Harriot also cites in the same reference. The ostensible motivation, to preserve intact the Euclidean tradition in geometry, plays a very minor role in Harriot's notes. The basic aim, to elude the fatal link with imaginaries, they do touch on. More dimly underlying the arguments are the crucial logical facets of the problem, which Harriot faced with a greater conceptual clarity, formulating in words, however, only his own conclusion: the choice of sign-rule is the user's—a fact not fully recognised by mathematicians generally until the 19th century. (shrink)